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Saturday, December 19, 2015

Christmas Cheering

I had nightmares about them for the
last two two nights.

Six year old girls screaming with need,
demanding to know where the presents I’ve hidden are, why Shelly
got two tops from the Gap last year while Lia only got two from Roots
and if everything was made in the North Pole why could they exchange
it. Topped it off by demanding that I should be thin because I was
promoting childhood obesity by glorifying the fat liberation movement
when fat should only be liberated via liposuction. They were six. I
don’t pretend to remember six, or even my own daughters at six
anymore. But it wasn’t like that.

Five days so far in the grotto with the
elves, reindeer, desperate parents and screaming children. The
screaming parents were the icing on the proverbial cake of shit. I
felt like I was starting to feel like Hitler in the bunker. I didn’t
share that observation with anyone, thankfully. By the end of the
shift the mall had drafted in some local kids to be Santa’s Elves
as well. Because any nightmare can be improved by the inclusion of
more children.

I finish the shift using the skills one
hones after years of office jobs and dealing with in-laws. Fifty
years of work just teaching me how to fit into polite society by
lying. Once you’re old, the jobs are harder to come by: every year
I bulk up for Christmas, make money on the side that doesn’t quite
get my pension checks dinged, buy a few small things for family that
would break our budget otherwise. Each year it seems less worthwhile
than the year before, harder to justify. Maybe the kids grow up too
early, or I am too old, but the season gets meaner and uglier with
each store competing with each other, malls waging wars for consumers
and the fact that all gift-buying could be on the Internet in minutes
hanging overhead like a ghost of Christmas future.

I almost laugh at the thought as I
leave the mall. It’s just after eight in the evening, and the
grotto closed a few minutes ago. I make more money because I don’t
need a pillow and my beard is real, but I’m not sure I’ll bother
with either next year. Everything about the season just drains and
tires and I almost don’t notice the kid until he coughs.

He’s short and pale; I think he was
being one of the elves, but by them I was dreaming about eggnog and
rum.

“Santa has gone home,” I snap. I
have this idea of the elves sitting in Santa’s lap, demanding
shorter work weeks and paid holidays. It’s not as funny as it
should be.

“He went home hours ago,” the boy
says firmly.

“Pardon?”

“You weren’t being a proper Santa
at all and that’s not very jaysome you know!”

“What?” I manage. I didn’t think
they let disabled kids be the elves, but maybe the kid got past them
just by being screwed-up in the head.

“Being jaysome is sometimes work,
but! it’s important work,” he flings out, and pouts after. The
pout is epic, astonishing: everything kids want in a pout perfected
into a single cute sulk.

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”

“You weren’t being Santa. You were
being all kinds of grumpy inside and kids can tell when adults aren’t
real, which is why most of them grow up badly! You tell kids not to
lie and then lie all the time and expect them to believe you, and
then Santa comes along and he’s the worst of the lot, and even
worse when they find out that Santa isn’t wholly real. But the
gift-giving and kindness are, and Santa is what parents want to be
but can’t always be and kids eventually get that and it’s okay.
It’s not if you ruin that for everyone.”

“Kid. This is just a job I do for a
few weeks every year,” I say, pushing past.

“But it’s not! Being a person is
being them, not just a job,” and he’s in front of me, quick. Kids
are like cats, so fast at tangling between legs it can be amazing. He
looks up, and something in his eyes stops me from pushing past again.
“If you make it just a job, if you hate it but you do it, you turn
into a Krampus. Into a monster that pretends to be a Santa and is why
kids cry in Santa’s lap because they can sense the change
happening,” and I step back at the fierceness under the words.

“Being a parent is hard I bet,” he
continues, soft. “There’s lots of things you’ve hidden from
children to protect them, and sometimes it’s necessary because the
world has lots of dark corners and the worst monsters are sometimes
way too human. But Santa isn’t something that has to be hidden:
giving gifts is important to
the giver more than even the receiver and being a Santa is a gift of
time and listening, and helping parents know what to get their kids
and if you think it’s not important you can’t be one again.”

“I
can’t?” I repeat, wondering if this is really the kid of someone
who works at the mall, some weird TV sting.

“You’d
turn into a Krampus, and that would be bad for everyone. But you
don’t have to. You could be jaysome. Be
happy, find joy in this again, and
lots of other things too.
Most worthwhile things are pretty hard cuz that’s what gives them
worth and – and I’d like to stop a Krampus before it happens, as
a gift from me to me!”

And
the kid grins at that. The grin isn’t a blow, not a weapon. I don’t
have words. It’s open, and pure, and entirely a sharing. I
don’t know how I know this, don’t understand if the kid knows
just how potent his grin is. I manage to say something – I
have no idea what – and
the kid grins even wider, somehow, and heads
down the street, skipping and singing Christmas carols to himself at
the top of his voice. Off-key.

I
keep walking toward the car. Thinking about the grin, the desperate
sadness under his earlier words. I don’t know what happened. I have
no idea how it happened. I just know he was hurt, and doesn’t want
me to hurt people. That simple, that innocent. I get in the car
slowly and drive home as slowly. Thinking about things I’ve hidden,
how hard this season has to be on my wife because it’s hard on me.
Thinking about how to make her smile a little like the one that boy
offered like the unwrapping of the dawn as a present. About my
grandkids, and that Santa should visit some of them at home if our
budget can stretch to it.

I
don’t think I’m going to have nightmares about screaming children
tonight. Because even Santa is given gifts at Christmas.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”